Balkan Multiculturism: Example to Itself & to the EU

Almost all countries in the Balkan area are the multicultural samples with their heterogenic mosaic. This heterogeneity has become the reason of social togetherness and economical development in its history. According to old-fashion scholars economic development is the reason of socio-cultural togetherness; but the fact is,socio-cultural and political integrity is the reason of economic development. Then theeconomic development with the socio-cultural integrity brings welfare and regional peace. If this hypothesis is right, Balkans has the core value for the economic development, welfare and social togetherness and also EU's multicultural purpose

EU's role on the Western Balkan Democratization

This article overviews democratization process of the Western Balkancountries by the assistance of the EU. Democratization firstly should be developed in the region by the domestic willingness and later by the external assistance. The EU's vision toward the future of the Western Balkans isaccepting the region's countries to the EU, after completing their democratizations by using Stabilization and Association Agreements as acarrot. This external assistance has developed South East European countriesdemocracies like Bulgaria, and it is still working in the region like Macedonia. Democratic developments are very beneficial for the region and also for the EU on her target of encompassing the continent

A MULTI-COUNTRY LINK VECTOR AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Vector Autoregression (VAR) is an alternative to structural econometric model building, specifically in forecasting. The challenge of the VAR technique has been, however, limited to models of national and regional economies. This dissertation extends the scope of the VAR technique with the construction of a multi-country Link Vector Autoregressive (LIN-VAR) model based on eighteen OECD economies. It offers a unique way of combining the linkage specifications of global structural econometric models with the VAR technique. Each national economy in the LINK-VAR model is specified by four macroeconomic variables: output, nominal money supply, prices, and a short-term interest rate. Linkages among countries are formulated through link variables created from IMF\u27s multilateral trade weighting scheme. The dissertation empirically investigates the extent to which an international VAR model can improve forecasting over VAR models which are limited to domestic influences. Two alternative linkage mechanisms were developed. The first mechanism links the four domestic variables of the typical country model to the other countries with a different link variable: an output link, a money supply link, a price link, and an effective exchange rate link. The second linkage mechanism includes both a foreign demand variable using the output link and an economic/financial price variable using the effective exchange rate link in each equation of the domestic model. Using monthly data for the period July 1972-June 1984, the two versions of the LINK-VAR model and individual country closed economy VAR models are estimated to generate twelve period ahead ex-post forecasts for statistical evaluation. The results from both linkage experiments emphatically suggest that forecasts of domestic variables improve substantially when a linkage mechanism is added to domestic VAR models. This argument is more forceful when the forecast evaluation focuses on country-by-country comparisons

Soft Powers of Oman in Foreign Affairs

Oman\u27s soft and intangible powers have been increasing dramatically in the new millennium. Half of its soft power components, culture, and national morale, had already been there for centuries. The other half, governmental skills and diplomatic skills started to be shown in the international arena in the last two decades. Its mediation tactics, becoming the back channel between the Euro-Atlantic zone and Iran in triangulated diplomacy, pursuing quiet diplomacy, and putting an acceptable distance between NATO and Gulf on a seesaw assisted Oman to reach the diplomatic soft power rank. Among Oman’s governmental skills, moral values, effective services, the credibility of the government, and good political and economic orchestrating could be counted. This paper finds and elaborates on Oman’s soft power sub-components and brings pieces of evidence to its scholastic allegations to be a primary resource as a first article on this topic.

Using a SAT solver to generate checking sequences

Methods for software testing based on Finite State Machines (FSMs) have been researched since the early 60’s. Many of these methods are about generating a checking sequence from a given FSM which is an input sequence that determines whether an implementation of the FSM is faulty or correct. In this paper, we consider one of these methods, which constructs a checking sequence by reducing the problem of generating a checking sequence to finding a Chinese rural postman tour on a graph induced by the FSM; we re-formulate the constraints used in this method as a set of Boolean formulas; and use a SAT solver to generate a checking sequence of minimal length

Hardness and inapproximability results for minimum verification set and minimum path decision tree problems

Minimization of decision trees is a well studied problem. In this work, we introduce two new problems related to minimization of decision trees. The problems are called minimum verification set (MinVS) and minimum path decision tree (MinPathDT) problems. Decision tree problems ask the question "What is the unknown given object?". MinVS problem on the other hand asks the question "Is the unknown object z?", for a given object z. Hence it is not an identification, but rather a verification problem. MinPathDT problem aims to construct a decision tree where only the cost of the root-to-leaf path corresponding to a given object is minimized, whereas decision tree problems in general try to minimize the overall cost of decision trees considering all the objects. Therefore, MinVS and MinPathDT are seemingly easier problems. However, in this work we prove that MinVS and MinPathDT problems are both NP-complete and cannot be approximated within a factor in o(lg n) unless P = NP

Using distinguishing and UIO sequences together in a checking sequence

If a finite state machine M does not have a distinguishing sequence, but has UIO sequences for its states, there are methods to produce a checking sequence for M. However, if M has a distinguishing sequence D, then there are methods that make use of D to construct checking sequences that are much shorter than the ones that would be constructed by using only the UIO sequences for M. The methods to applied when a distinguishing sequence exists, only make use of the distinguishing sequences. In this paper we show that, even if M has a distinguishing sequence D, the UIO sequences can still be used together with D to construct shorter checking sequences

Checking sequence construction using adaptive and preset distinguishing sequences

Methods for testing from finite state machine-based specifications often require the existence of a preset distinguishing sequence for constructing checking sequences. It has been shown that an adaptive distinguishing sequence is sufficient for these methods. This result is significant because adaptive distinguishing sequences are strictly more common and up to exponentially shorter than preset ones. However, there has been no study on the actual effect of using adaptive distinguishing sequences on the length of checking sequences. This paper describes experiments that show that checking sequences constructed using adaptive distinguishing sequences are almost consistently shorter than those based on preset distinguishing sequences. This is investigated for three different checking sequence generation methods and the results obtained from an extensive experimental study are given

Negotiation Level Between the EU and the GCC

EU-GCC relations started thirty years ago, but proceeded very slowly. After the first agreement between the two institutions in 1998, the EU transformed, the GCC slowly changed, the international system dramatically converted and rules between two parties were amended by the ENP of the EU. Although both sides need each other, obstinate policies caused cessation of relations several times. According to some scholars, the GCC is becoming a periphery region for them, however the GCC still needs the EU as a first market in total trade. Bilateralism, cultural differences, the GCC's loose integration and lack of EU leverage in the Gulf could be lined up as some reasons for the non-progressive relations. Recent developments such as Trump’s election, Brexit, the Qatar crisis, 5+1 Iran Nuclear Deal and Russia's growing interest to the Gulf are affecting EU-GCC relations negatively. In this study, historical and recent developments and their effects on the EU-GCC relations were examined; and lastly some alternative solutions are discussed